If ObamaCare Passes, Will You Ever Be Able to Trust Your Doctor?

If and when ObamaCoup passes, one-sixth of the economy will belong to the feds. The American Medical Association (AMA) and all the other medical unions (that's what AMA comes down to) will go to D.C. to get their money, against fierce competition from the psychologists and social workers, who are also trying to get their share of the loot.

You and I will no longer be the main clients for our medical doctors. We won't be in the loop. Your money will be forcibly extracted from your taxes, and when we get sick we will be passive recipients of the kindness of strangers -- like Barney Frank and Harry Reid. And Nurse Ratched. It's not your doctor anymore; it will be the state's doctor.

I would not trust my doctor under socialism. Right now I think he is on my side. If I get some dread disease I think he will try to cure me. Why? Because we have the same incentive: my health and well-being. That's not true anymore in Britain, where the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) decides how much money the state can spend on you.

If you have a statistical twenty years to live, you get one-third as much as a teenager who has sixty years to live. It's tax money per year of expected life. The old and sick are likely to die sooner, so they get less care -- not more, as we do today -- because we are much more compassionate than Dr. Obama will ever be. For him, "compassion" is just a rhetorical sledgehammer to get money out of the middle class.

That's how they do it in Europe. The ruling class has its own high-quality medical system, just as the U.S. Congress has the best medical insurance today. It's just like an Agatha Christie murder mystery, where the old lady is always afraid of being poisoned by her heirs, who will get the loot when she dies. It's the biggest theme in British murder mysteries, because when Christie was writing murder stories, upper-class families were totally dependent on the family fortune, which was controlled by the oldest family members.

The younger ones received stipends, or they just had to go earn a living. So fantasies about giving rat poison to Auntie were part of everyday life. People speculated on when their parents or uncles and aunts would die and they would finally get all that money. The incentive was always there for the heirs to kill off their elders. Under socialism, the state will do it for them.